Procession of the Gods
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: A view of the objects and symbols in Kira's race to become the god of the new world.
1. Apples

**Author's note: Random one-shot pieces based on symbolism in Death Note. Thanks to Scourge for the beta; I owe her one for sending her all the crazy one-shots.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note.**

_The Apple_

_The End of Creation_

He was born of dust from God's own hand. His golden eyes locked upon the tree and the crimson fruit that hung from its branches. Eve was not there to take the first bite; the serpent was not there to tempt. Light Yagami hadn't needed a reason to taste the difference between good and evil. Boredom was motivation in itself.

He couldn't exactly say what it tasted like—death, he would say later, the blood pouring from his body as he crawled toward the Shinigami, his golden eyes flickering closed, losing sight of the great tree, of the flaming sword.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

_Avarice_

It fell into his hands, handed to him by the god who tried so very hard to keep himself neutral, tossing it to the nearest victim. A golden star in his hands, reflecting the smile on his lips—the dark, treacherous smile.

They clamored towards him, the immortal goddesses, hanging on his every word. Who is the most lovely, who is the most divine? The decision of a mere mortal recreated the world of the gods. The world bent to his will. To be fair, it destroyed them—the world was his.

Chaos gave him the world, for the apple of discord had fallen from the heavens into his mortal hands.

_Bones of the Truth_

It seemed that L couldn't help but go through Light's trash. Light attempted to block out the thought of L's spider hands fingering through the garbage can. He showed the pile of cores to Light, with the gnarled, twisted stems reaching out like skeletal fingers.

The questions were bright in his raven's eyes, waiting for an answer. Light's golden eyes contained nothing but shadows of doubt; he remembered nothing of those crimson apples. He remembered nothing of what they had been in life, sitting on the grocery shelf, hanging from the tree.

All that was left was their dark bones.

_Power_

Light never understood addiction—even when he watched the demon writhe in the absence of the crimson fruit, begging for just one taste, just one bite, with his body contorting into jagged angles that would break any human's bones. He found it amusing, to watch the demon tortured under his own need; something in him found it humorous to watch.

To think that one fruit could cause so much pain—the sadist in Light couldn't help but smile.

_Color_

Against his hand it was red as blood, the blood he had never spilt, the blood that had never covered his hands, the blood that had not stained his fingers red. He hid the blood of his victims in the fruit's glowing skin—the sign of his guilt was in the flesh of the apple. Gods of Death did not have red hands; their hands were as white as snow.

It was the crimson skin that showed his guilt.

_True Love_

L, did you know Gods of Death love apples?

It was a lie, and he knew it. Love—what did the shinigami know of love? Obsession, desire, gluttony consumed the creature, manipulated so easily by a single fruit—but then, that was love, wasn't it? The puppet strings that bound one so easily to another, without the pretense of an apple between them?

Light knew that they wouldn't understand, but in the end, Ryuk's love was the only one that was pure and true.

_Midnight Visions_

The detective ate an apple once, and Light couldn't help but break into mad laughter. For in that moment, his eyes turned yellow and wings sprouted from his back; a Death Note was at his side, a jagged grin spread across his marble face. A blink and the vision was gone—the midnight eyes were blank as always.

Later, he judged it to be sleep deprivation, but he never was able to look at the detective the same way again.

_Justice's Retribution _

His glass coffin buried beneath the earth, his bone-white flesh hidden beneath the soil…. Light stood above the grave, an apple in hand, a single bite taken from its surface. The poison dripped out like blood from a wound.

To the fairest.

_Threat_

The bow was tight in his hands, the arrow stretched behind his ear; his eye locked on the crimson fruit balancing on the child's head. The crowd roared, the fame grew… the child with raven's eyes, the child with the snow white hair. So young, so inexperienced—completely unaware of the apple balanced so delicately upon his head.

The black eyes reflected a single arrow, knocked to the bow of the masked archer.

_Cannibalism_

Gift of the immortals, fruit of passion and youth. He felt it slipping away with each bite they took, his youth, his strength, his will lost upon the world as the apple was eroded by time and the hunger of men. He was being eaten away by the very people he set out to save.

All the while, the shinigami was laughing, watching as they tore the flesh from his skeletal fingers.

_Rights of the Divine_

It was what the dead consume. Starved, their transparent fingers reach for the scarlet fruit—so close within their reach. The taste of sin on their lips, they cried out for another taste, a taste for the life denied them. Light held the apple aloft as a beacon above their grasping hands, meant only for the gods to reach.

With his marble pedestal high above the masses, it was only the winged shinigami that dared to take a bite.

_Failure by Misinterpretation_

The eleventh hour, the eleventh trial, the apples hanging so innocently from the tree—his fingers twitched, his eyes narrowed. Nothing was without a price; no trial without adversary. He knew that much. And yet, the fruit was light in his hand, red as the blood in his human veins, as the setting sun in the west.

It wouldn't be until later, after the apple had been eaten by the grinning shinigami, that he would realize he was meant to be his own destruction. Light Yagami failed his eleventh task.

_Kingdom of Death_

Death came for him in a yellow warehouse, his face concealed by immortality, watching as the blood poured out of Light's wounds. In his hand rested a scarlet apple, half-eaten, accompanied by a death god's toothy grin.

"Damnit."


	2. Ink

_Ink_

_A Nature of Being_

It was in his veins.

It pumped through his heart and through his flesh—he was the writing in the book, he was the rushed penmanship on the page, he was the characters that spelled out death, he was each name listed upon the lined papers, he was the fate dealt out to them.

He was the ink.

_A Cruel and Fickle God_

He wrote the names diligently, a pen in his hand. They listed into the thousands, as if he were God creating the night's stars; each name shone brighter than the sun against the ashen sky. The seven days wore on. His hands ached by the end; his eyes closed as the pen fell from his hand to the floor. The ink dripped slowly from his fingers—the names clinging to his hands, afraid to be lost in the sea of death he had thrown them in.

A single star lost among thousands, to be stored and shut away in the night sky.

_Addiction_

The pen called to him sometimes. In the middle of the night, his eyes would open wide and he would shudder at the force of it. The pen wanted to write; it wanted to caress the notebook's slender pages, it wanted to spill its life blood onto those clean white pages. It begged him, demanded his attention, its black surface glaring in the moonlight.

The pen frightened him far more than any man.

_Good Intentions_

It sat there, white as snow, pure and unused. It was like sunlight, almost untouchable, and yet it was his pen against its virgin surface, his pen that made the mark against its bone white flesh. Its pages belonged to him and him alone—the hours that raced between him and the paper, the names that flew between them… two immortals conversing in a language no god or man would have understood.

Its white pages spoke of death and life, of revenge and sacrifice, of paradise and inferno. It was only with the notebook that he knew he was God.

_Disguise of Guilt_

The detective searched for the blood that stained his hands, turning them over and over under the laptop's blue glue, dissecting each vein for the blood he should have been covered in. His raven's eyes narrowed in frustration, in hatred of the fact that Light could hide so completely within himself.

It was ink that stained his hands, ink black as night that covered each finger—but the detective was not looking for truth, he was looking for blood.

_Author of Woe_

He sat on the top of the world, the sky pouring down upon him, heaven's light soaking through his ink-stained hands. The world was unfurled to him—so high upon his marble pedestal he watched the masses go about their business. He was fate, writing their tales in his slim black notebook. His eyes saw them at a distance, a statistic, a number, a name within his tale (woven in spite of them), their faces sketched and then set aside.

The story grew; the mountains of paper surrounded him. It was his tale, his masterpiece. Light Yagami, author of the world.

_The Art of Cleaning the Stains_

His sleeves were covered in black, and like blood, it just would not wash out. The fountain pen did not stain; the fountain pen shouldn't have stained, and yet he found every day that his fingers had become black as death, his sleeves stained with streaks of darkness. He scrubbed vigorously, his brow furrowed, and the shinigami would laugh at his vanity.

It was not vanity, but fear, because the stains would not come out.

_Renaissance_

It was the ink that changed the world, that ended the medieval age and brought about an age of beauty. It was the world's second renaissance, a second rebirth of man. His word spread through each criminal tossed aside into the arms of the grim reaper; the world was being renewed through each heart attack he dealt.

He was returning the light to the people, he was recreating humanity's spring.

_The Ease of Suicide_

He dreamed of drinking the ink bottled in his pens, of swallowing down the black poison so it might coat his intestines as it painted him black. Why not? he had thought, Why not turn myself into ink? It tasted of ash, cyanide dripping down his throat—he wanted to cough it out, yet he kept swallowing. It was intoxicating, the idea of being poisoned to death, poisoned by the ink that ran through his pages.

He awoke with a fright; the Shinigami startled into laughter, his eyes wide with the seduction of suicide, his hands shaking with the ease.

_The Goddess of the New World_

Misa might have been offended to learn that she was not his first lover, but then, she would not have understood the attraction of the pen—the way it rested between his fingers, the sight of its black surface, guarded in the lamplight, the way the ink shone against the notebook's pages, the sight of the ethereal sheets each and every morning, waiting for only him, waiting for the dance to start again, for the next name to be entered within its pages.

Misa seemed dim in comparison to the ivory goddess.

_Adequate Substitution_

When did his blood turn to ink? When did the needle pricking against his skin become a pen? The car's backseat smelled of leather and the sharpness of his blood, red against the white piece of paper—Kiyomi Takada. The blood sufficed, a natural substitute for the fountain pen.

How long before his blood turned to shadows, till it was dark as the ink that rested in the confines of the fountain pen?

_Silent Requiem_

His goddess permitted no erasers—what's said is said. She spoke with closed lips and empty, heart-less eyes. The names could not be erased; they were irrevocable as the spoken word, more so. Every name was meant to be written. There were no mistakes, there were no accidents, there were no doubts between them. L Lawliet was no accident, though it was not his hand that was stained with his raven's blood.

Her paper white skin bore his name with so many others, smiling at the way he stood above his rival's grave, the dead look in his eyes. Contrition was a price he could no longer afford, regret a luxury far too pricy.

The notebook was an unforgiving mistress.

_Red and White_

The world looked as if it had been sketched by his hand, the drawings shaded by his penned hand, the red ink bleeding into the white snow, outlining the faces of the world around him, the detective's black eyes turned crimson under his gaze. The blood drained from their features, the color taken from the world—only the red remained.

Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, rubbing his eyes to blink away the nightmarish vision of the blood against the purity, the humanity against death.

_Gates of Paradise_

The saint's hand scribbled down names as he waited in line, the bullet wounds aching all the while, the blood dripping down his fingers and onto the heavenly floor below. The line stretched beyond eternity. Finally, his golden eyes found the saint in front of him. The saint looked up, his brown eyes dark as the blood on Light's hands.

His pen paused, not a letter came forth, and he fell. He fell because he no longer had a name; he fell because the saint had not found a word to write.


	3. Time

_Time_

_Counting_

The counting is natural now, not always external but it exists nonetheless, like a soft unheard heartbeat the numbers echo in his mind. His eyes always seem to find his watch and he'll watch as the seconds pass until the bodies fall.

It might disappoint his victims that the only thought Kira spares for them at the time of their death is a number.

Forty.

_A Gift_

Some say that life is the greatest gift one can give to his son is life, Light disagrees, the greatest gift his father ever gave to him was a wrist watch.

_A String of Numbers_

The life span wasn't a surprise, neither were the eyes, somehow he had always felt that God was a mathematician. Life wasn't dictated by choices, by gods or demons, no matter what Ryuk might have thought.

Light found that his life was dictated by a string of invisible numbers that floated above his head.

_The Watchmaker_

There are gears upon his desk glitter in the lamplight as his screwdriver twists the innards of the world, always his mind is on the form, on the perfection while the repairs are being made. In his hand the world remains, screaming in agony as he rips out its innards, and yet he doesn't listen for in his mind he can already hear the ticking of paradise.

_Absence_

When Light pictures Mu he imagines that it is not that one sees 'nothingness' but that one feels the absence of it. He firsts tries to imagine 'nothingness' in itself as absence but that seems to be too broad. Instead he narrows and his mind settles on one final image that he can grasp.

Mu is the absence of time.

_The Eleventh Hour_

Ryuk often wonders at his pace, at how quickly his hand flies across the pages, and the god of death often turns to the human and asks why the speed, what's the rush?

His answer is always the same, it's the eleventh hour and a life time is miniscule in the face of eternity.

_Fairy Tales_

L likes to remind him that children's tales always end with the moral and that's why Kira would never win, because what kind of a moral could Kira provide? He always smiles at the thought but he remains unmoved because Light remembers that every child's tale begins with time and that Light is master of this in ways that the detective never can be.

_The Godhead_

They think he is a God simply because he controls time and space through death, he supposes it is logical enough but he thinks there is far more to being a true god then that. Kira is content to let them think what they will and he grins at the thought of their worship but Kira can understand the difference between a god and God.

_Imprisonment_

It is a curious thing, to lose one's sense of time, to have it simply slip away between the stonework and the steel bars. He's not sure if he's surprised or terrified by the thought of it, the lack of it, the lack of place in that cold dark room where the camera was his only friend.

(Light imagines later that L was quite frustrated at the fact that Light was more concerned about the lack of a clock then the fact that he had been imprisoned for being a mass murderer)

_Death _

Time stops for no man but men from time to time stop for Time. He stands on L's grave looking at the date inscribed upon the stone, soon to be eroded away by lack of maintenance, eventually nothing more than a rock with a few illegible letters inscribed in its surface.

Time marches past L Lawliet but Light has the feeling even as he looks down that L marches past time as well.

_Immortality_

Ryuk has difficulty understanding the passing of time, he understands life and death quite clearly, but Light finds that Ryuk cannot grasp the finer aspects of time. Light supposes it is only natural, after all he hears that in the Shinigami Realm it is the Human World that offers light and not the sun.

Still Light finds it somewhat chilling that this clown faced creature will remain untouched once Light's bones have long since been buried.

_The Mirror_

Light believes that time no longer runs the same for him, that somehow the notebook has changed him and continues to change him, he feels both older and younger than the men who surround him as if his mind has leaped wildly ahead of his young body. Soon he finds himself disconcerted when he looks into the mirror and sees his childish face and he can't help but wonder where did those years go?

_The Notebook_

The notebook is old, Light knows this, he can feel it in his fingers that this notebook is far older than anything he can imagine and yet like Ryuk the notebook has a certain ageless quality to it. It will look weathered but it will never crumble, it will feel worn in his hands yet the stitching will never come out, it gives the illusion of age because Light is beginning to think that the notebook is time, and that is why it kills so well.

_Metrics_

Light once asked Ryuk why the shinigami chose seconds as their units of counting when the notebook had been around far longer than humans had. He asked who designed the notebook, how did they know, why did they care? He asked a lot of questions but Ryuk only smiled and finally the shinigami said he didn't know the notebook had been created long after all the gods of death were dead.

Light doesn't ask why Ryuk is blatantly lying to him and he doesn't care to find out, he simply has the notebook nothing more.

(It is at this point that Light realizes that time in the Shinigami Realm is far more warped and twisted than he expected)

_The Dark Tower_

It is said that at the center of existence their rests a dark tower and that both space and time turn about it as if it were the axis in a great wheel. Light has never had any desire to reach this tower but he moves toward it nonetheless, as it is inevitable for all men who wish to be God.

He dies in a warehouse at the hand of his own divine instrument, he climbs the stairs and at the top of the tower he finds his afterlife.

He finds the center of time and the absence of time, he finds Mu.

**Author's Note: Well, never thought I'd update this again but here I am. Thanks for reading and reviewing, more reviews would be appreciated.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note. **


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